Fresh Apple: TheAppleBlog (11 сообщений)

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TheAppleBlog
TheAppleBlog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
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Books-As-Apps: Cutting Out the Clutter
Over the holidays, I ended up reading an awful lot using my iPhone/iPod touch. I started with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, just to determine whether or not I wanted to cough up ten bucks to go see the Brad Pitt movie, and then, since I enjoyed it, I downloaded and read a number of other F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories. To do so, I used Stanza, because it’s a great app, well designed and well maintained, and because the books are free under the Life +50 license. Which is not to say I won’t ever purchase an ebook through Stanza, just that I haven’t yet had cause to.

What I don’t think I will ever do, though, is buy an individual book application. To me, that would be like buying individual albums as independent applications instead of through iTunes. Why would I opt to have a thousand different icons on my desktop, one for each album, when it would be far easier, more organized, and more sensible to keep them all in one place, i.e., my iTunes library. The same applies for electronic books. How is it beneficial, to anyone besides publishers and developers, to have discreet applications for individual books?
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Daily Apple: Clear iPhones, Historical Resistance, Dumb Apple
See Inside Your iPhone - It’s a case mod that lets you in on the secret of your magical phone. iCustom is making these clear plastic cases for the iPhone, but apparently the mod is only available in Russia, at least for now. Any Russians out there keen to do this? I can’t see why you would be.

D.C. Store Meets Resistance From Historical Society - Nothing disrupts your attempts to stay firmly planted in the past like a big old Apple store popping up and obstructing the view of ancient brick buildings. Two preservation societies are blocking Apple’s move to their Washington D.C. site, on the grounds that the design won’t fit in with the timeless surroundings.

The App Store Pricing Vortex - Another essay on app store pricing, this time from Inside iPhone, to go with the one we talked about in an earlier article. The conclusions here are similar, but the analogy the author uses to paint a picture of what’s happening in the app store is particularly effective.

Apple Appears Twice On Forbes’ Dumbest List - Two, count’em, two spots on Forbes’ Dumbest Moments in Business list for 2008. The offending incidents? Allowing the “I Am Rich” app to make it into the app store, though not for very long, and the Bloomberg/CNN Jobs is dead debacle. The second one isn’t their fault, but I’m sure they’re not pleased with the double appearance.

Jobs Getting Worse, Or Not - Gizmodo started quite a ruckus today, including at least one anecdotal incident of stock sell-off, by publishing this article about Steve Jobs’ declining health. CNBC says otherwise, but I’m not sure who to believe anymore.

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Zephyr: Throw Your Creativity to the Wind
As seems to be the trend with Smule’s iPhone applications, their point may not be immediately clear. With many App Store offerings, “enjoyable time waster” could be the point, but that’s not always enough for some people. There were those who didn’t see the point of Twitter when it was in its infancy (myself included), yet now it is a legitimate vehicle for information dispersion, adopted by all sorts of businesses and personal users alike. But I digress. Suffice it to say, I would almost describe the concept of Zephyr as Twitter, only created with doodles rather than text.

While Ocarina left Smule fans who owned an iPod touch out in the cold (due to the requisite microphone for input), Zephyr comes along with its wispy snowflake drawings that are strictly touch-based and available for either device. The ‘ink’, you see, is actually made up of snowflakes of varying size and shape. As you draw on the screen of your device with your finger, a tune akin to wind chimes accompanies the resulting picture.
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Learning to Love Technology: My Wife and the iPhone

As I think it goes with most geeks, our better half (yes as a matter of fact, some of us have girlfriends and wives!) usually isn’t the most technical of people.

My lovely wife can use a computer just fine, but she’s not the type of person who considers that technology can be leveraged to make her life easier — I guess that’s where I come in. So when I passed my original model iPhone down to her, it wasn’t received with the excitement that I would have hoped. A few months under her belt with the iPhone on her belt, she’s really getting into the concept that it makes her life easier.

As long as it could dial numbers and remember a couple of her regularly-called contacts, my wife didn’t care what the phone looked like or the functions it had. So when I bestowed my iPhone upon her, it lacked the fanfare that I would have hoped for. But I pressed forward and began to demonstrate some of the features that I thought would make taking care of the kids and the household and everything else in her busy life, as simple as remembering to bring the phone with her at all times. It wasn’t a smooth transition — there were some scratches and bruises (to my ego) — but these days, she actually loves her iPhone!
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Plan Your Macworld 2009 Schedule

At this past year’s SXSW one of the most popular “tools” used by attendees was a web app called SCHED. It was immensely helpful in figuring out what events were offered, who was going, and if you wanted to go.

I’m excited to announce that this is now available for Macworld 2009 courtesy of TheAppleBlog.

If you’ll be attending Macworld next week, this web app is the perfect way to figure out your schedule for the week. Best of all, it’s free. Nothing to pay for, no ads, nothing. Just pure, schedule goodness.

Some nifty features worth noting:
- Create custom schedules - Create an account and create your own personalized schedule that you can hook directly in to iCal.
- Search - There are hundreds of events. Using the search feature you can narrow that down significantly
- Most popular - Find out what events are most popular
- Group calendars - Create group calendars on the fly like so: http://macworld09.theappleblog.com/shpigford,gtmcknight,chirag
- Mobile Safari Version - Just go to http://macworld09.theappleblog.com on your iPhone/iPod touch and get an optimized version.
Hopefully we can pull together a TAB meetup…which of course will be on our SCHED.

Go check it out: http://macworld09.theappleblog.com

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The Ultimate Mac Browser Roundup

If any one application is near and dear to almost every Mac users heart, it is the web browser. With more applications becoming web based, and web applications becoming more complicated, the browser’s appearance, feel, and most of all performance become even more important. 2008 has been a big year for web browsers, with Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, and several massive improvements in javascript performance. 2009 is poised to be even more impressive in browser achievements, with new versions of most browsers in the works, and the promise of a new player with a big impact, Google Chrome.

Each browser was run through the industry standard Acid3 and SunSpider tests.

If you are looking for choice, performance, feel, or appearance, at least one of the 16 browsers below should fit the bill.
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Quad Core MacBook Pro On the (Macworld) Horizon?
You may or may not have forgotten about the MacBook Pro’s larger self, the 17-inch model. Following its conspicuous absence from the lineup of new laptops announced at the notebook event which took place this past October, news came that Apple had not forsaken the bigger-screened version, but that its release was delayed due to production issues. Well, we’ve yet to see the 17-incher appear, but now it looks like there might’ve been good reason for the prolonged absence.

APC today is suggesting that the recently released (just yesterday, in fact) low-cost quad-core processor from Intel, the Core 2 Extreme Q9000, might have something to do with Apple’s hold out. That’s right, the theory is that Apple could be prepping its first quad core notebook using the chip, which, as APC points out, does work out well on paper, if you consider the chip’s price point and Apple’s apparent acceptable margins. For the sake of comparison, consider that Acer has already announced a gaming laptop with a $1,799 price point using the chip.

At this point, the theory is just that, a theory, based on the timing of Intel’s release and the continued presence of an old machine at the top end of the MacBook Pro line. It is, however, a sound theory that holds up to scrutiny. The timing couldn’t be more perfect for a Macworld announcement, and it’s impossible to conceive that Intel didn’t tip its hand to Apple earlier about this development, and the timeframe for its release. The new price point of the quad core processor would allow Apple to stay under the dangerous $3,000 mark.

Apple could also be planning to offer multiple models, splitting the 17-incher into two basic configurations, one with a dual, and the other with this new quad core chip. That would account for the rumors that circulated before Macworld that internal Apple pricing sheets were showing more models than were released at the October event. Taken together, all the clues lead me to believe that we’ll almost certainly be seeing this in the flesh (in the aluminum?) come Macworld.

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Daily Apple: Thumbs, Cart Before Horse, Jobs Props, More Space, Cheaper, Served Up
We Invented The Thumbnail - Apple, along with Google and Microsoft, are facing another patent holder in yet another legal battle. This time, a Michigan-based company is claiming to have a patent pending on image previews for files and programs, aka thumbnails, which are used in Apple’s Finder and Cover Flow technologies.

Real (Fake) iPhone Nanos! - Rumor has it Apple will be introducing a new, smaller, cheaper version of the iPhone, which has already been dubbed the iPhone Nano by many. It remains to be seen whether or not the leaked cases and dubious looking photos will prove accurate, but there’s already a copycat out there. Pick yours up now in Thailand.

Jobs One of Best Head Honchos, Say Employees - That’s according to a survey by Glassdoor, asking employees to anonymously rate their top bosses. Nearly 300 people filled out the survey, and Jobs placed second, with a very favourable 90 percent. Maybe its his approachable taste in attire?

32GB iPhone at Macworld? - Add another rumor to the growing list surrounding Macworld. This one claims that the upper limit of iPhone storage will finally follow its iPod touch cousin, and double in size to 32GB. Not, by any means, a far-fetched possibility, but also not yet backed up by any reliable sources.

$99 iPhone, Courtesy AT&T - No, it didn’t arrive at Wal-Mart, who just started selling the iPhone at a $2 discount, but AT&T is selling the 8GB model, refurbished, for $99 dollars from now until the end of December. Of course, that’s still with a contract, so don’t go totally crazy.

Apple Home Server at Macworld? - Another Macworld rumor, this time regarding a possible home server-type upgrade for the Time Machine lineup. Check the details in-depth via the link over at 9to5mac.

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iPhone Developer Too Cheap to Buy Icons [UPDATED]
It may be the season of good-will, but one naughty iPhone-developer has decided to play the role of Scrooge in the iTunes App Store.

Movies, created by French developer, Olivier Bernal, went live at the App Store on December 19. The app, retailing at $2.99, allows users to grab essential information on the latest box-office releases.

The icon for Movies clearly features a watermark from iStockphoto, a royalty free image library, implying that rather than purchase the master image, Bernal has pilfered the preview sample.

This particular iStockphoto license (including the ‘Electronic Items for Resale’ addendum) is available for 115 credits. At 95 cents per iStockphoto credit, this would be a one-off cost of $109.25. Bernal would therefore need to generate only 37 sales of Movies to cover the cost of the image license.
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Apple's Got a War Chest of Cash

I’m not going to lie to you — this is going to get geeky. Not run-my-mac-from-the-command-line geeky, but more pocket-protector-and-green-visor geeky. I am an accountant after all. That being said, someone asked me the other day what the big deal was with Apple’s war chest.

For those who don’t know, Apple is currently sitting in Cupertino with a cool $12 billion in the bank. And if you throw short-term investments in the pot, Apple has quick access to $25 billion. That’s a TON of money — especially for a company with $32 billion in revenues. As a comparison, HP has about $15 billion in cash and $118 billion in revenues.

I began pulling Apple’s financial statements to see what I could find out about Apple’s “war chest,” as it’s being called, and found out some interesting things. But first, a quick lesson in financial ratios.
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Fixing Poor Laptop Ergonomics
Got a MacBook for Christmas? I’ve used laptop computers almost exclusively for a dozen years now, and they’ve been great, but for day in, day out, workhorse duty the standard laptop configuration does have serious ergonomic deficiencies.

If you position the computer high enough for comfortable and ergonomically healthy viewing angle to the screen, your wrists will be cranked down in unhealthy ape-hanger mode, stressing soft connective tissues, including the troublesome carpal tunnel where the brachial nerves pass through your wrists to your hands.
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